Fitzgerald: What’s wrong with the Dubai port deal

Even if every reviewing committee that examines the Dubai port deal declares that there is “no security threat,” there are nevertheless three considerations.

1) The Administration, and the government generally, no longer can be trusted to know what is best. The warnings before the 9/11 attack were clear; Condoleeza Rice’s attempt to fudge all of that should not be forgotten. The Administration and the State Department suffer from the same myopia that, 30 years ago, led to an inability among their predecessors to figure out that Saudi Arabia was not our “staunch ally” — and that an energy policy needed to be forged that would cause the price of oil to go up because we would tax ourselves, and not wait for the Saudis to raise prices. That could have saved, oh, about a trillion dollars (for more on this, google “Posted by Hugh” and “recover oligopolistic rents”). No “security threats” today does not mean that there will be no “security threats” tomorrow.

2) People living in New York and Baltimore will be made distinctly uneasy knowing that their ports are controlled by a company whose owners are Muslims from the United Arab Emirates, a collection of statelets — Abu Dhabi and Dubai being the best known — which are full of people who loathe us as Infidels. Some of them are distinctly unpleasant. All kinds of ruling families and the others who rule the economic and political roost in the constituent statelets of the U.A.E., for example, seemed to find nothing morally wrong, were in deed indifferent to, those thousands and thousands of tiny children, often under the age of 4, snatched from their Pakistani or Indian or Somali or Bangladeshi homes, brought to the U.A.E., trained under horrible conditions to be tied on the backs of camels, and during either the training, or in the actual races, were so often maimed or killed on the spot. (When the outside world began to notice, and to protest, and only then, did the U.A.E. begin to substitute robots for those tiny sacrificial slave-jockets). After all, who cared — they were from Pakistan and Bangladesh and Somalia; they weren’t Arabs, they were expendable, and camel races are such fun, after all. That is the level of moral development in the United Arab Emirates.

3) We now witness the spectacle of Bush using, for the first time, his power to veto, in order to protect the United Arab Emirates — instead of agreeing that Americans are perfectly justified in mistrusting, and wishing to discourage, any Arab control of any sensitive business. We would not dare to sell the running of any airports to, say, an Algerian company, or a Saudi company, or any other Muslim-owned company, would we? Why are the ports different?

This deal has symbolic importance. To Bush, the symbolism is: we have nothing against that fine religion of Islam, and in the “war on terror” which is all we are told, repeatedly and idiotically, we are fighting, the U.A.E. is a “staunch ally.” This attitude, this desire to curry favor with Arabs and Muslims, will always get us in trouble. It gets us in trouble as we overlook so much of what Pakistan, that incubator of the Taliban and its diplomatic and military supporter, pretends to fight on our side against Al Qaeda while half the Pakistani army, at least, would choose Al Qaeda over the Infidel Americans any day, and 85% of the Pakistani population would readily do so.

The phrase “War on Terror” is a good example of what is wrong with Bush’s view of things, and of the way he has failed to educate the public. He is timid and ignorant. He cannot identify the enemy but merely one of the tactics of the enemy. He apparently does not know how to use synecdoche.

Meanwhile, CAIR is attempting to bludgeon Congress by claiming that opposition is “anti-Arab bigotry.” Let them try to bludgeon. But if Bush shows he cannot figure out that many people in this country are far ahead of him in comprehending the nature and menace of Islam, and at this point it is doubtful that he can, he should simply get out of the way, shut up, and not dare to use that veto. We are all getting fed up with his obstinacy and inability to figure things out, and to respond coherently, articulately, cleverly. I don’t care that he came out of Andover and Yale knowing nothing. That’s his problem. But he has been President for five years. His inability to come to grips with Islam, to stop being sentimental about a “world religion,” can no longer be hidden or explained away. The large-scale presence of Muslims in the Lands of the Infidels, behind what they themselves have been so clearly taught to regard as behind enemy lines (the lines of Dar al-Harb, as opposed to Dar al-Islam) has everywhere created a situation that for Infidels is much more unpleasant, much more expensive, and much more physically dangerous, than it would be without that large-scale presence. Bush cannot bring himself to even think a thought like that, or to begin to study Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira as those whose duty it is to protect us should be doing. He should have been devoting his time not to reassuring the UAE, or calling its ownership as innocuous as would be such ownership by the British, but instead he ought to be moving heaven and earth to rally NATO around Denmark (remember “an attack on one member of NATO will be considered an attack on all”?), and to standing up for, reminding the Western world of, the principles of individual liberty enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and every one of which is flatly contradicted by the Shari’a. He should be having the Pentagon and the State Department (not its Arabists, but its Europeanists) and the C.I.A. figuring out how to campaign, as they once did in Western Europe (remember the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine — the best use of C.I.A. money conceivable) undertaking a vast effort of pedagogy to counter, and end, the influence of the Islamintern International at the U.N., at the E.U., in the European press and television, and in halting, and even reversing, the jihadist presence in the Lands of the Infidels.

He doesn’t have to say it all quite the way it has been said above. But he has to grasp its undeniable truth.

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